In the current design of the typical personal computer, there is no watchdog timer to monitor the operation of the CPU. A watchdog timer is needed to monitor the CPU and to reset the CPU when it is in a run-away mode or halted for unknown reasons.
Current watchdog timers, as are well known in the prior art, consist of a hardware circuit which must be added to the computer, which consists of a timer which must be reset by the CPU periodically to prevent it from overflowing and generating a reset to the system. All application programs running on the system must start the timer running, and then reset the timer periodically. Both the timer start and reset must be done in each application program. Since there are various designs of watchdog timer circuits for personal computers, application developers have to design programs to interface with various designs of watchdog timers.